Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!umn-cs!raghavan
From: raghavan@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Vijay Raghavan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Run-time Checks for C
Message-ID: <10113@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU>
Date: 18 Nov 88 17:07:17 GMT
Reply-To: raghavan@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Vijay Raghavan)
Organization: CSci Dept., University of Minnesota, Mpls.
Lines: 19


   I made a casual statement in a local bulletin board to the effect that
the C language definition doesn't really preclude any implementation from
doing certain run-time checks (for array bounds, type checking, referring
contents of uninitialized pointer variables &c), it's just that most
(okay, all!) implementations don't do any such checking because of efficiency
reasons. Now I'm not sure that this statement is really true (I mean I'm not
sure that sufficient information can always be passed to the compiler for it
to generate code for meaningful run-time checks.) 

   Comments? Treat this as a question of academic interest. Ignore 
considerations of efficiency on architectures which don't support run-time
checking mechanisms. Also assume that all support library functions (in
particular, malloc, calloc etc.) have been written in a way as to support
these checks, wherever possible. 

  Vijay Raghavan